Elizabeth (by Penelope Volkofsky)

Preface to Elizabeth

A young art teacher alights from a train in western NSW in a floral dress and long white gloves. She has come to find her man in the outback. They marry and have four sons. She battles a spinal disease and becomes quadriplegic.

For five years she is confined to a wheelchair as a mostly silent mum on our sheep station. She loves it when we brush her hair. I usually see it as a chore but sometimes I catch myself looking at those lustrous black locks and want to run my fingers through them.

Our homestead is planted on a purple ironstone ridge. We are in the heart of forty-six thousand acres of box trees, hop bush and mulga scrub near a tiny village called Byrock. To the west is a small mountain peak. Long droughts scorch the earth into powder. When good seasons come the land is a waving blanket of corkscrew grass.

As a young boy, a favourite summer thing is to lie in bed at night and listen to the wind in the leaves of an old box tree outside my bedroom. A favourite winter ritual is to get up at dawn, walk across the frosty grass of our back yard and through the orchard of orange trees to our back fence where I watch the sun rise and pray for mum. The prayers grow, and I find myself praying for all of us.

I’m unable to look at mum’s face anymore—the verdict is too obvious. I look at her fingers instead. In them I imagine healing colour and life spreading back up into her face. But they’re only swollen. She dies in the Bourke Hospital in my first year of high school.

This woman had a sweet defiance. In her slow, deliberate way, she spoke to us often about faith, hope and love. Like the beautiful, wild and frightening world around her, she became a treasure.

Elizabeth